PC terribly slow ! CPU usage 100% !!!

[Pivert]

Hi,

my sons PC is running terribly slow ( Win - XP SP1a // PIV 2.4 GHz // 1GB
RAM // HD free space plenty)

When ctrl-alt-del into task manager I see that explorer.exe has many many
handles and threads ( about 5-5 times what I have).
System has about twice what I have.

I see no alien in teh program and processes listed in tasl manager.

Kaspersky and Bitdefender foudn 1 virus each, but that changed nope.
Ad-Aware SE : nothing and no change
Same : SpySweeper, Trojan Hunter.

I am almost sure there must be an intruder acting in background somewhere
( else why so many resources used by his explorer & system ?)

How can we investigate and block this ?

He did a clean install and less then a week later again he is hit !

He works on a LAN at high-school and needs that LAN.
Firewall is ZoneAlarm 4.5 free ( detects many netbios intrude attempts that
get blocked : to 4 per second !)

All ideas are wellcome !
Are there processes not listed in task manager ?
How find them ?

TIA for your lights !

Badly need them !
Pivert

 

[R. McCarty]

Performance Lagging is a broad topic, lots of things to consider.
If no viruses/malware are present I would 1st suspect the normal
software that young people install. (P2P, Kazaa, Media players).

Boot to Safe mode and check performance and TaskMgr. If the
PC runs normally, then it's definitely a 3rd party application or a
form of malware or software trying to act as a server.

What resident Anti-Virus/Firewall is your son running ? I would
also log in as an alternate user and see if the threads and handles
counts are "High". A "Clean/Fresh" can get invaded very fast. It's
generally recommended to install Anti-Virus/Firewalls at the end
of Application installs - so you have to stay off the Internet until
the Security software is in place.

From your message it sounds like you are looking in all the right
areas. You might want to download/run Process Explorer from
SysInternals to help diagnose your problem.
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

 

[tjones]

running kaspersky huh? that av can be a serious drain on the system. I've
used it before and it slowed my whole system down. Try disabling the AV and
check system performance. If you feel the need to get a better av prog then
you might consider NOD32. I have heard the new version of kaspersky is also
good.